


Five Steps to Better

by StellarRequiem



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Romance, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Slow Romance, carwash, grimmons implied, project deadlancer, romance progression, wash/carolina, washlina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 14:35:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4628928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternative title: Five Steps to Better, A Lifetime to Her</p><p>After Epsilon succumbs to rampancy, those he left behind slowly come to terms with his passing. As they do, the process of grieving exposes other feelings, bringing the last surviving remnants of Project Freelancer closer together than they've ever been before.</p><p>Wash/Carolina, very much Wash's POV.</p><p>Written prior to "The End," so technically canon divergent. Technically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Steps to Better

**Author's Note:**

> In most breakdowns of the stages of grief, depression comes after bargaining; but most people experience multiple stages sporadically and often simultaneously as they progress through them. I therefor decided that it would be ok if depression came first in this fic. My rationale was that, especially for Wash, depression could easily become an ongoing paradigm from early on. It also worked better with the narrative.

*

Loss

_*_

As Epsilon—as Church—blinks out of existence, Wash’s first instinct is to wonder how long this death will last. His second is to hate himself for asking.

His third is to avoid empty, quiet Epsilon-sized space in favor of scanning the small crowd around him. Especially Tucker. _Especially_ Caboose. Caboose, who’s standing quietly, his grip relaxed, Freckles silent in his hands. _Fortunately._

In fact, of everyone—red, blue, fed and new—looks pretty composed, all things considered. Albeit through their helmets. Wash could do without knowing how much overtime the filters behind their visors are working to negate humidity—if their faces are as moist as his feels like it’s about to be. _Don’t do it. Do not cry._ He’s been hysteric in Epsilon’s name one too many times already; and he isn’t sure he has the right to be that way again. _You did kind of convince the last version of Church to sacrifice himself for your vendetta._

Alpha’s vendetta, too, _technically._ He just hadn’t accepted it yet.

Alpha’s and Carolina’s.

Carolina, who’s peeling her helmet from her head with one hand while the other digs into the back of her neck, slides up under the aubergine and copper tinted glint of her pony tail, fingertips scraping her her scalp, thumb driving into her temple: into the empty silence space left in her head. The echo in her implants shaped like Epsilon.

 _I know that feeling._ Wash thinks at her. _I hope he was better at leaving you than he was me._

He must have been, seeing as she isn’t screaming, or on her knees, or trying to tear her brain out of her head in order to make it _stop._ Her hand _is_ on her head, but her bright eyes shut tightly enough to squeeze free tears couldn’t look more different from what Wash remembers if she’d let him pose her. _That’s how this is supposed to look._ Like loss.

Somewhere to his left, someone clears their throat. Probably Sarge, since he’s the first to speak, his words chopped up by aforementioned throat-clearing; and, maybe, something else. Maybe.

“Is that it? Is he gone?”

Tucker’s sagging shoulders straighten. _Oh no._

Wash turns to intervene— _It’s Sarge, Tucker, that’s just how he is, you know that—_ and finds the back of Caboose’s head in his way.

“ _No,_ ” he says, an emphatic but quiet declaration. _Oh man, Caboose,_ “He’s just not here right now . . . anymore.”

Caboose’s head falls as he speaks. A circle of helmets glint in the relentless Blood Gulch sun as the majority of the heads around him follow suit, silence taking over just in time to frame the dusty thunk of Carolina’s helmet falling from her weak fingers to the ground.

Wash turns back around and finds her with her face in her hands, the tussled mess of her hair sticking through her fingers.

“Carolina?” he asks. _Nice delivery._ He sounds more confused to his own ears than he does concerned.

A muffled noise slips past her hands. A sobbing sort of noise.

_Holy shit._

Wash’s first instinct is to stand there, sputtering. His second is to hate himself for it. His third is to reach out. And place a hand on her shoulder.

On Carolina’s shoulder.

She stiffens.

_You are an idiot. The biggest idiot, ever . . ._

He waits for her to yank away from him, or at least lto turn furious, tear-glistening green eyes on him, eyes that are both accusatory and degrading, _demanding_ to know what he’s doing in her space at a time like this. But that isn’t the way she looks at him at all, when she turns uncertain, tear-glistening green eyes on him; both pleading and bereaved, showing him the way the Epsilon-shaped hole in _her_ head feels and how it’s reflected in her heart. So Wash slides his hand over by an inch to reach the narrow unarmored space just above her shoulder, his thumb and middle finger, if not his whole hand, now in position to offer her a gentle little squeeze.

She responds to it by turning ninety degrees to face him. To put her arms around his waist, to put her cheek against his chest-plate.

_Holy shit._

As he puts his arms around her, too, something tightens in his chest.

*

Stage One:

_Denial_

*

 _Wow_ is the first thing he remembers thinking of Carolina.

There had been a time, about _five_ minutes before realizing how talented—and a little scary—she actually was, and about _ten_ minutes before meeting York, _eleven_ minutes before seeing them together, that Wash had wondered if he, if she, if they—There had been a time when that _wow,_ and more complicated impressions, had gone unrepressed.

So, when she reaches out to him and his heart starts to shudder and his aorta ties itself in knots, it’s less surprise than resignation that runs through his mind. _So you’re not over that._

_And what a premium moment to realize it._

She pulls away while clearing her throat, pinching the bridge of her nose to staunch what Wash imagines is about to be a fairly spectacular rush of tears. He lets her go without a word. There aren’t any in his vocabulary which he could offer without feeling like he’s sullied them with his train of thought. Or which could help. But when she leaves her helmet, he does make a point of picking it out of the dirt before the next closest set of hands can have the chance. And two hours of pacing and sitting and deep breathing and avoiding Dr. Grey’s insistent questions about how _he’s_ coping, later— _I’ve watched him die worse ways—_ he’s the one that seeks Carolina out to bring it back.

He finds her along the cliffs, sitting on a rock beneath the shade of an overhang while pulling at a blade of grass beside her foot.

“Hey,” he says. “I . . . I brought your helmet.”

“Yeah, Wash, I can kind of see that.” _Smooth._ “. . . Rock?”

She slides sideways on her boulder-perch, opening a hand over the empty space.

“Thanks.”

He takes a seat beside her, trying not to touch her as he goes, though the clank of knocking armor sounds between them anyway. It’s not that big of a rock.

“So—”

She retorts before he can even ask.

“ _So,_ how am I doing?” her tone is scathing, and raw. “Am I done _crying_ yet?”

_Oh boy._

“There’s no shame in that, Carolina.” In the red puffiness that’s turning her lower lids the color of overripe watermelon, her piercing irises the rinds, resting on a bloodshot backdrop he can only half see as she stares straight ahead, out over the gulch. Her nose, too, is red enough to enlist as a sim trooper. A pink red, devoid of the warmer, multifaceted sunset colors trapped in each strand of her hair.

“I know,” she sighs. “I just don’t do it very often . . . it makes it all feel that much worse.”

“I get that.” _More than you’d know._

She turns her head to look at him, hair capturing the sun, and purses her lips. They’re chapped. _She bites them._ Wash remembers that from Freelancer: neat white teeth pulling flesh from a battered mouth until a halo of blood appeared at the cusp of her inner lip every time she pondered missions. It had been a planning habit, a whisper of some measure of uncertainty that was never present once they set out. At that point her eager confidence would take over in a way his never had. He’d _had_ confidence. Adrenaline. But never like she did. What she still does, in the heat of a fight, but doesn’t have now, despite the easy tone of her voice when next she speaks.

“How are _you_ doing, Wash?” she deflects. _What are you going to do about it if I actually answer that?_

He’d like to believe she’d do something. He thinks she would. Her tone says as much, or seems to.

“I’m dealing with it,” he says. Which is mostly true. _It’s not my first rodeo._ Just the last.

For a moment, that returning, incessant thought has him certain he’s going to vomit only for it to be replaced, again, by _will it actually stick this time?_ and the accompanying desire to crawl under the rock they’re sitting on and stay there until _he_ dies, too.

“Actually dealing?” Carolina presses, her expression shifting to a concentrated shrewdness that doesn’t match the devastation of her face.

“I’ll be fine,” Wash declares. He sounds gruff, his voice reverberating like gravel in his radio so that it sounds like Sarge has been trapped in his helmet.  “Will you?”

“No,” she says.

“Well—wait, really?”

“Is that surprising?”

“Well, no, I mean . . .”

She sighs.

“Of course I’m not fine, Wash,” she says, cool as a spring breeze. “I think I won’t be for a while.”

“. . . Oh.” He doesn’t know what to say in response to that level of honesty.

“But,” she continues, rescuing him from his haplessness, “I don’t think that mean that I won’t be ok _ever_ again, either. For now, to be honest . . . I think part of me isn’t even convinced that he won’t find a way back. He _always_ finds a way back. Whether he wants to or not.”

Her voice turns from even to hoarse in an instant as she chokes on the same hopes he does, albeit with less sarcasm, and more pain, in the way she voices them. When _she_ says it, it’s cutting. It’s just a little pathetic. It’s so _sad._

_Isn’t all of this?_

“Carolina . . .”

“Don’t, Washington.” She speaks through her teeth, suddenly snappish. Wash swallows, wishing again that he were under the rock instead of on top of it. Beside her. Within heart-twisting proximity, within the fallout radius of her grief.

“Has it hit you, yet,” she hisses, “that if he’s really gone, we’re really the last ones? _We are all that’s left of Project Freelancer_.”

 _Don’t remind me._ He knows that all too well already.

 _“_ Us,” she adds, “and a few missing weapons.”

 “I’m pretty sure we could be included in the ‘missing weapons’ category,” he replies.

And without looking any happier she _laughs,_ the sound bubbly with sobs still trapped at the back of her throat.A laugh that makes the aorta knot in his chest return; promises heart attacks and strokes and all manner of ways to kill him. _Nothing new there, though, right?_

“True enough,” she says, pausing to breathe deeply through her nose, resulting in a teary snort he ignores. His own breathing doesn’t sound much better. “But don’t you think we are better? Than we were?”

_God, I hope so._

“Is better good enough?” He wants so badly for her to tell him it is, that it churns his stomach.

“Yeah,” she says, eyes glazing over, “I think it is.”

_That hit a nerve. You’ve got a real talent, Wash._

She wipes at her watery eyes before they can overflow and turn to tears, a forced and concentrated effort, and clears her throat.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

 _Always the team mom, Carolina. But who takes care of you?_ He wonders this, wishing as he does that he could shut his own brain off. _That would be Epsilon._ Had been Epsilon.

“I honestly can’t tell,” he replies. It’s true, too: Most physiological sensation has gone numb by now, paving the way for the place he hopes his emotions will reach by morning: comfortable, hazy nothing.

Still, he decides in that moment that—assuming Dr. Grey hasn’t already cooked up one of her suspicious local flora dishes—it will be _him_ that makes dinner for _her_ , evenif he doesn’t want to eat, even if he has to restrain Carolina to pull it off. With the way her hands are shaking, it wouldn’t be hard to justify.

“Me either,” Carolina confesses, dropping her head for a moment. “But if we don’t eat, I’m pretty sure Caboose never will.”

_Right. Caboose._

His words, quiet and emphatic, ring in Wash’s skull. _He’s not gone._

_He’s just not here right now._

*

Stage Two:

_Anger_

*

Carolina’s characteristic battle cry rings out across the canyon. Her inanimate opponent’s answer is silence, followed by the dull whir of reluctant enhancements failing to execute. She shrieks again.

Her thrown helmet lands at Wash’s feet, looking far too much like Maine’s severed head to his mind’s eye. _That doesn’t even make sense, you nutjob._

_Maine drowned._

“God _damn it._ ”

“Carolina—”

“Don’t you fucking start with me, Washington.”

Wash sighs and picks up the helmet. It’s heavy, but not severed-head-heavy. Weighing the risks inherent to approaching her when she’s like this against what she’ll do if he tosses it to her and misses, he inches towards Carolina with its weight still cupped in his hands.

“New armor still not working?”

“No—I’m about to drop a grenade on it because works perfectly,” she snaps.

She’s seething through clenched teeth, the force of her exhalations tossing her hair out of her eye for a second. It’s getting longer, still in her face most of the time, but falling almost to her chin like a frame of fire around half her face. She’d declined to let Donut cut it when she’d seen what he did to Simmons. Wash wonders if wishes she hadn’t, as a strand of it falls across the corner of her mouth, sticking to her bitten lip. She spits it out with another half-growl, but nevertheless high-pitched, exclamation. He’d be tempted to think of it as a squeal, if not for the fear that thinking it might someday lead to saying it and inevitably lead, in turn, to her having to kill him.

Wash realizes he’s staring at her, thinking too much and saying too little, onceshe rounds on him.

“What do you _want_?” she barks.

“Huh?” _Smooth. Always so smooth._ “Oh, just . . . damn, Carolina: ‘thought you’d want this. Never mind.”

She snaps the helmet from his hands.

“I don’t need to you to babysit me.”

“I know that.” he says. He _sighs_. “But you sound like you’re about to kill everything in reach over this thing. Why don’t you just take a break—?”

“I’ll take a break when it _works_.”

 _Will that ever happen if you’re like this?_ He wonders, though it seems like an unwise thing to say aloud. So he catches himself sighing again instead of speaking. Like a Wash-shaped balloon losing what little air it had to begin with. _Which is oh so helpful. Can’t you do anything to calm her down? To help her?_

“Ok,” he says. “Sorry.”

_Is that the best you can do?_

“. . . I don’t need you to apologize.”

She’s still speaking through her teeth, but the volume of her words drops low enough to drive through to the planet’s core. The swing from screaming to barely audible leaves Wash with whiplash, killing whatever resentment he might have been building against her behavior. Though he still sounds exasperated when he speaks.

“What _do_ you need?”

“I need,” she snarls, brows descending over her eyes, diving towards her nose in a fit of frustration.

She grits her teeth as if preparing to saw apart whichever words are supposed to come out of her mouth next. But nothing comes.

Her face relaxes _, almost_ erasing the seams that furrowed brows have etched into her forehead over the years. Wash can remember a time when she’d had skin like an untarnished moon, or porcelain; when the folds and seams left by her expressions changed as her moods did, never lingering, never permanent as the faint lines between her eyebrows are now threatening to become. They’re not _line_ lines so much as blueprints, but he can see the promise in them of how age and rage and worry are starting to shape her face. _At least you’ll never have to worry about dimples._ She’d have to smile for that.

He wishes he could make her.  

_But you can’t, can you?_

_How could you?_

He doesn’t even know how to staunch the waterfall descent of her features from frustration to some empty near-cousin of despair as she whispers “I _need_ an AI.”

 _An AI._ Not just for the armor.

_Now you’ve done it._

“I thought this armor was supposed to run without one,” he says, struggling to reroute her train of thought, “Wasn’t that the entire point?”

Something flickers in her eyes, something dark behind the vail of shocking electric green, and her softened, desperate features harden again; turning to ceramic. Or maybe diamond. Something beautiful and cold that feels like a punch in the stomach just to look at.

“I’m starting to wonder. If that _was_ the point, Charon missed it. It doesn’t _work_. It manages power usage better but there’s just so _much_ of it, I can’t—it doesn’t work.”

“If it doesn’t work, wouldn’t it be better to try and fix it than just keep training around it? You’re going to hur—”

“I _am_ trying to fix it!” she shouts over him. _Good job, Wash. Haven’t you realized yet that opening your mouth just makes things worse?_ “I’ve worked on it. The reds have worked on it. I even let Caboose work on it.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” _Jesus, just shut. Up._

She scowls at him.

“ . . . In hind sight I realize that wasn’t the best comedic timing.”

“The worst,” she retorts.   _Ever. Of all time._

“Right. I think I’ll just . . . go check on the bases now then, actually. Good luck with the armor.”

“Please do,” she snaps. “You’re not helping here.”

_Or anywhere._

*

“Why do I even bother?” Wash mutters to himself as he steps through the doorway. The concrete base muffles sound, but the effect isn’t powerful enough to quiet a shouting Tucker. Wash catches enough of the exchange to know he wishes he hadn’t.

“Robot body?”

 “Get this stuff out of here”

“Never going to need it”

“Never coming back”

“Left us. Again.”

_Damn it._

Tucker has been on the verge of boiling over for weeks now. Wash would rather leave him to it; but letting the spillover splash Caboose seems mostly wrong, if likely cathartic. _Maybe if you leave them to it, Tucker will get mad enough to just turn into Church, and Caboose will fall in love with him for it._

_. . . As if you’d ever be that lucky._

Wash sighs, and walks into the base.

“Tucker,” he bellows as he comes around the corner, “back off.”

Tucker rounds on him.

“No way. Please, make him move this shit, Wash, because I swear to God if I have to deal with this for one more second, I’m just going to kill him.”

“No, you will not. Caboose: I think it would be better if you put all this stuff,” Wash glances at the mess of parts and tools strewn across the floor, “in storage for now. If you leave it in here someone’s going to step on it, or something.”

Caboose stands, unflinching, blinking at Wash through his visor. He can _feel_ the blinking—an empty, mindless gesture. _Oh, come on—_ and then his shoulders fall.

“But, Agent Washington—” he still calls Wash that sometimes, as much as he wishes he wouldn’t.

“Just Wash, Caboose, remember? We’re all friends here. Now please, just pick this up. I’m going to go talk to Tucker, I’d like the base clean when I get back.”

Tucker’s groan—which Wash imagines must be accompanied by matching eye-rolling—drowns out Caboose’s response.

“Come on, Tucker,” he grunts. _Let’s go deal with this._ Like he probably should have weeks ago. _Why didn’t you see this coming?_

_Is there any part of this you’ve actually helped with?_

Tucker follows him outside and upstairs without a word, waiting until they’ve stepped out onto the roof and Wash has turned to face him to launch into his imminent tirade. _You deserve that._

“Don’t you dare lecture me,” Tucker snaps, his voice cracking on _dare_. “He’s got to get over it sooner or later. Or did you want another Freckles?”

“You know that I don’t. But if believing Church could still come back—at least for a little while—helps him accept that he’s gone in the first place, I’ll take it.”

Tucker bristles, choking up on the rifle he’s toting. It’s an old habit they’re all terrible about: clinging to their guns like it’s a compulsion.

“Yeah? Let me know how that goes for you when he’s building another death machine, Wash, because if he does I’m out.”

_Oh, please._

“What are you going to do, move in with the reds?”

“It’s probably better than here.”

“You know what, Tucker—” _You’re probably right._

_They handle their family a lot better than I do._

Carolina’s words ring through his skull: _You’re not helping here._

_I know I’m not._

Wash lets his sentence die. And sighs.

“Look,” he says, “I’m doing my best with Caboose, the same as you are. I just don’t know what to say to him that won’t make things worse.”

“You could tell him to get over it,” Tucker grumbles.

“Like you are?” He hates the words the second he says them. _You’re on a roll today . . ._

Tucker drops his gun. It hits to roof with a clatter, throwing light from the constant, blistering sun up and into Wash’s eyes in shades of gun metal green. He blinks past it to find Tucker with his hands balled into fists, seething through his visor.

“No,” Tucker shouts, “not like me. I’d rather Caboose fucking _get it_ , because I sure as hell don’t.”

“Get _what_?”

“Why Church didn’t tell us!”

_And . . . There it is._

His shouting draws attention. A blip on Wash’s motion tracker labeled “C” turns and slides towards the base, sweeping across the canyon in the direction of the sound, come to watch Wash escalate when he’s supposed to be helping. He can feel it coming: A rising, desperate cousin of anger he can’t keep a hold of.

Tucker’s voice fades to a near-whisper. “Why didn’t he let us try to help?”

“I don’t know,” Wash snaps, “I have no fucking idea.” It’s his turn to boil over. Once shouting, he can’t seem to stop. Tucker stands before him, flabbergasted and chastised.

“I wish I did,” he continues, “completely unable to halt his own mouth as “I really do. Because if I knew that—”

If he knew that, maybe he’d also know why he hadn’t seen it coming.

_I’m sorry I had no idea when I should have._

After all, he’s supposed to be familiar with Epsilon’s pre-mortem logic. _If you could call a meltdown logic._

He tries to remind himself that this time was different. Not a suicide—just a . . . _going._ And that rampancy, at its most advanced stages, isn’t a meltdown at all.

_No, it’s just being human._

_Which makes this so much better._

 “I—”

Tucker starts to speak, and stops. And Wash just stands there, his words fading from the air, chest heaving, mortified as his own voice echoes back to him inside his helmet; wishing he could move time backwards, slide back to this morning, and never get out of bed. Never open his mouth. To any of them. Because he _should_ have seen it coming; but should also have kept that to himself.

_You idiot, just stop talking. You’re not helping any of them._

In fact, if he _could_ turn back time, maybe bed wouldn’t even be enough. Maybe erasing today wouldn’t be enough. If he _could_ backtrack by years, to Freelancer, if he could have kept Epsilon together the first time, given him the support to stay together, to hold out a little longer—If there were a way to go back, and trade places with Church . . .  maybe _that_ would be enough.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. The words are almost a whisper.

But Carolina hears him as she bursts onto the roof.

“What for?” she demands.

 _Oh no. Not you, too._ He’d have liked to have gone back to bed before she arrived to see the success of this exchange.  He chokes as he answers her.

“For not realizing how,” _broken,_ “far along he was.”

“And why was that your job, again?” she demands, moving towards him across the roof.

Tucker steps aside to let her pass, narrowly avoiding her elbow as she goes by. It’s jutting out, away from her body, forced away from her waist by the fact that her helmet is tucked under it.

“Or are you saying that everyone whose head he’d ever been in should have seen this coming?”

“What? No—Carolina, _I_ ,” had already seen him die.

_How did you not know, Wash?_

“Because you’re right,” she concludes, ignoring him.

_What?_

Wash’s mouth falls open—he can feel his lower jaw abandoning him—and he thinks the word, but can’t form it. Carolina continues across the roof. She clutches her helmet to her body, her face looking more like armor and glass than the it does, hardened but fragile. Her lips are pressed together and quivering as she searches for words. The eye he can see around her hair is too bright, even for her.

“ _I_ should have seen it, though,” she corrects him, “not you. How could you, Wash, when _I_ had my head too far up my ass to understand what was happening, and _I_ was the one he was living with?”

“But—”

“ _But?_ ”

“But,” Wash’s voice breaks, crackling inside his own helmet like a broadcasted reminder of the control that’s slipping away from him, “ _I_ should have known what to look for.”

_There. Now I’ve really said it._

Carolina’s mouth falls open, moving for a moment over wordless silence, horror putting a bow in her one visible brow. And then she snaps her mouth shut. And when she does speak, it’s with a jaw so tense it seems wired shut, so clenched between words that it changes the shape of her face to something squarer as her temples pop beneath the trapped firelight of her hair.

“ _Wash_. He didn’t do this on _purpose_.”

“Then why didn’t he let us try to help?” Tucker demands. Carolina sighs. Her hair swings forward as she turns her face momentarily towards her feet.

“Because he did—He didn’t want to be brought back or kept alive any more when—”

“When he _what_ , should have died years ago?”

Carolina turns towards Tucker, offering Wash a view of only the side of her head, the glint of her armor, leaving only the sound of her voice to assess her by. It’s even. Resigned on the surface if raw underneath. As it always is, these days.

“Yeah,” she says, before turning to Wash again, “he’d just . . . made his peace.”

“Good for him,” Tucker grumbles. _Chokes?_ He turns on his heel and stalks off the roof.

Wash, on the other hand, stands immobilized by her words.

_His peace._

Going, instead of leaving.

_Peace. What must that be like?_

Wash wouldn’t know. _You haven’t known peace in your life._

With that thought, all of it—living, being, failing, collapsing—comes back to him in a rush. The word _peace_ ’s ugly and inverted echo. He’s at Valhalla again, shooting Donut in the gut. _And why?_ He’s listening to South mock him past the grenade-induced ringing in his ears. Watching her fall. Watching her body burn. Shooting Donut in the gut.

Shooting himself in the head.

He remembers that. He’s never been able to stop remembering that. As if it had been him. A bullet in his mindscape; blood and the ground rising up to swallow him— _I remember, I’ve seen—_ and  still there was this grief that wouldn’t stop, this unravelling no amount of order he tried to impose on his life, no matter how much good he tried to do, would slow.

He watches his mind collapse again as he falls through the bloodstain in his head. Breaking over all the ways he’s failed— _not failed: wronged_.

Over everything he’s done, and didn’t do.

 “Wash!”

He gasps.Sunlight and the glint of armor recall him to the world.

_Gone again and still taking me with you, Epsilon, you son of a—_

His hands are knotted in his hair, fingers tearing at his own skull. _When did you take your helmet off?_ It’s laying about fifteen feet away. _What did you do, you psychopath, drop kick it?_ While Carolina’s rests by his feet.

And her hands rest on his face.

One palm against each cheek. With gentle, uncertain contact that makes the pattern of fabric across her palms confusing, blurry. A vague sensation at the edges of stubble—against the evidence that all the advanced technology in the universe won’t prevent a determined five o’clock shadow, which he’s glad she can’t feel through her gloves any more than he can feel her hands.

“Wash,” she says again. Softly, now. “None of what happened to him is your fault. _None_ of it.”

 _Even the first time_. She doesn’t say it out loud, for his sake, but he knows what she means. Can feel it in the low intensity of her voice, and the way she leans in to speak. For a moment she seems close enough to kiss him.

“. . . I know,” he croaks around a sinking in his chest. _Do you?_ “I just hate—”

“Being helpless?”

_Myself, mostly. But that too._

He nods.

Carolina’s resting palms assume a firmer grip to better follow the movement of his head as he lowers it, turning the cross-hatch pattern real. He can’t look at her. Her bitten mouth and changing ceramic skin. Her electric eyes, or the sympathy in them. The gravity of how much she actually _cares_ and how that fact consumes him.

She snorts.

“Please,” she scoffs. “Helpless—No one survives what you have because they can’t help themselves, Wash.”

“It’s not myself I’m worried about.”

_Why can’t I help the rest of you?_

“Maybe it should be.” Her voice shifts from gentle to stern. She bites her lip, and adds “ . . . You do enough for us. And . . . and I’m sorry if I made you doubt that, earlier. You—”

She trails of. Interrupts herself before she can add _something_ that pulls her closer to him again, draws her forward as she doesn’t speak. Closer to him with the _something_ ready on her lips, pulling his heart to pieces.

She releases her grip on his face a moment later.

The gesture seems to take him with it, his chest cavity switching from full-to-bursting to bleeding out hollowness with tangible weight; and he’s glad she can’t see the look on his face as she bends to retrieve her helmet. When she stands again she studies him—the intensity of her gaze cold against his temple—and sighs. And steps forward, a milder version of _something_ in her eyes.

She rocks onto her toes.

Brings her mouth up to his face.

And kisses him on the cheek.

The spot where her lips touch him explodes, eradiating a heat all the way into his chest that sends his heart lurching through his ribcage, and his armor, and the core of the planet. _Oh dear God._

She clears her throat and steps away.

When Wash can speak again, struggling to recall her suggestion, _worry about yourself . . ._ he says “Maybe I’ll give it a try.”

*

Stage Three:

_Depression_

*

_Ok, that’s it._

_I tried_. _I said I’d try and I tried. And now, I’m giving up._

Wash groans. The lights in the base are too bright to face, the day too long ahead of him, efforts towards helping himself in any deep or meaningful way—as he’d promised Carolina he would—too daunting from the sideways angle from which he views them as he wakes.

His first reaction, therefor, is to go back to bed. Immediately. Sleep is easy. His body _hurts_ less when he’s asleep. But Tucker calls him out before he can reach his unconscious nirvana.

“Finally joining the world of the living, huh?”

He groans again.

“That depends, Tucker: if I roll over are you going to have your clothes on?”

“Dude, I’ve been awake for two hours,” he retorts. “I’ve _been_ dressed. And _showered_.”

“Yeah, Wash,” Simmons interjects on his way out the door. W _hat are you even doing down here?_ “Nice bedhead, by the way.”

“Thanks,” he grunts.

 _He’s not wrong, you know._ His hair is getting long, and grows scruffier as it does. It’s gotten to the point where it’s more brown than blond, and lost whatever shape it may of had weeks ago. _It’s a mess just like the rest of you._

Resisting the urge to sigh, Wash drags his legs over the side of his cot. His knees groan as they go. His back feels like it’s ripping, muscle by muscle, all along his spine. He gets like this sometimes: days on end where he wakes up in pain, having slept away his days at some odd angle that ruins his body and feels as restful as a nap on a bed of nails.

It’s not a state he particularly wants to fight. He can remember having wished for hazy nothing, at some point. For a nice, numb empty. He’s gotten his wish, now, and seeing through the fog renders even being upright a seemingly insurmountable effort he manages by reminding himself, like a song on loop, that there will always be days like this, there always have been, and that he’s always managed to sit up before. If anything, he’s overdue for this. For a while, there—for months on end—he’d been ok. Or, at least, ninety percent of ok. And the remaining ten percent had been manageable, albeit because he had so many other things to manage; like people, and rescue, and civil wars, and mercenaries. And Epsilon.

_You just keep coming back to that._

They all do.

Wash drags himself to standing.

He finds Carolina on the roof, clutching a cup of some imposter the military likes to call coffee. It’s where he finds her most mornings; where an unspoken routine of meeting each other as they meet the day brings them together, breakfast in hand, best plans for the day prepared to be laid.

“Morning, Wash.”

“Morning. How’s it going?”

She groans into her water-coffee, and pours the last of it down her throat.

“I’ll let you know when I’m awake,” she replies, muffling half the sentence as she wrestles herself into her helmet with sleep-clumsy fingers, “assuming I ever get to the point where that happens; or where I care.”

“Sounds like a good start,” he says, settling down beside her, aching legs overhanging the roof. She replies with a sound like a laugh’s imposter: it’s the right kind of sound, mechanically similar to laughter, but with all the wrong energy. She sounds like she’s trying to cough it up through use of force.

“Tired, huh?” he says, stating it for the record more so than as a question. “How are you feeling otherwise?”

“Honestly?” she replies, glancing sideways at him, “like crap. But I’ll probably survive.”

“You always do,” he offers. Her face turns in his direction. Under her helmet it’s difficult to say, but he thinks—would like to think—that he can feel her smiling at him, or something. Or trying to. Though the snarling grimace she’s been wearing has faded, lately, her smile has yet to make a consistent return. _God, I still wish it would._

“What’s your plan for today?” he asks. She shrugs.

“I guess I should take the damn armor out again. If I cycle between enhancements it’s pretty doable, but I feel like I could still run more of them than I am.” _Since when was “I Guess” a part of your vocabulary?_

“If it gives you trouble, you’re always welcome to join us.”

“By _us_ do you mean the sim troopers, while you order us through another obstacle course?”

“No,” he insists, “I mean _us._ We’re running the canyon today, and I’m going with them. Assuming my legs don’t give out on me, you know, ten steps in.”

Carolina shakes her head. Her helmet throws a flash of sunlight into his eyes before his visor can compensate; as too-brilliant as everything else about her. _You are so lucky she can’t see inside your head. You have got to get ahold of yourself._

“Still sore?” she asks.

“Something like that,” he replies. He rolls a shoulder as he does, only for his back to seize up from shoulder to spine, locking up his scapula while the urge to hunch over threatens to tip him off the roof. _I wonder if that would be funny, or just sad._

He’d rather not know.

“Do you think it’s how you’re sleeping?”

“I don’t think that’s helping, no.”

She shakes her head again. “Were we always this much of a mess, Wash?”

He shrugs. “I probably was. _You_ always seemed to have it together, even when you didn’t.”

She scoffs, her helmet rising in a way that suggests she’s rolling her eyes, the motion taking the rest of her head with them.

“Yeah,” she says, “well, that was easier to pull off when I didn’t feel like shit all the time.”

“They say exercise can help with that,” he offers. “God knows I keep trying it.”

She laughs again, something a little closer to the real thing. It echoes in her helmet and crackles in his radio.

“Oh yeah?” she retorts. “Guess I ought to work up a sweat, then.”

She says that like she’s smiling, but like she isn’t; the words too slow and precise and pointed. _Flirtatious,_ and intentionally, casually, humorously so. The sound of it makes him feel as if his chest cavity feel were leaking under a slow and merciless compression; even as his heart beats double-time. _Get over it._

“Like I said,” he counters, matching her tone and then some, “you’re welcome to come sweat with me.”

 _Was that supposed to sound like a_ joke _-flirt? Because it didn’t._ It _sounded_ like one of Tucker’s lines, only dumber. And even sheltered by a helmet, he can feel Carolina’s raised eyebrows, and see the pause he’s given her in the perfect stillness she adopts, mid turn of her head. _It really didn’t._

As evidenced by Tucker’s sudden emergence behind them. Wash notices him on his motion tracker— _still too paranoid to turn that off—_ and whips around before he can open his mouth.

“Say it,” he warns, “and you get to run, _and_ do squats.”

“Not fair man,” Tucker whines. “Fuck you guys.”

Wash starts to stand, and stops. Beside him, Carolina laughs. Laughs as if she were _smiling_ ; if only for a moment.

*

He sees her again at lunch, leaning like a beacon against the base, a lighthouse for him to stumble towards.

“The prodigal son returns,” she declares.  He slumps against the wall of the base, sweat-dripping forehead pressed against the concrete. Carolina laughs in a single short burst.

“So,” she adds over the sound of him groaning, “Did sweating help?”

“Not sure. But I do think I need a shower.”

As Tucker pointed out, he _has_ needed one.

But that sounds like _effort_ , and the adrenaline of running is rapidly wearing off; the haze of overwhelm closing back in. Having walked back here without lying prone on the ground and surrendering to the sun is already a victory in and of itself.

But his Carolina lighthouse offers no solace. She leans over, and feigns sniffing him.

“You could say that again.”

“Not you t—” he groans, stopping short as her head falls against his shoulder. She rests there for at least the length of a sigh. For the length of two or three skipped heartbeats and a moment of static in his brain. _Fucking—_

He rolls his head along the concrete, turning to look at her, receiving a nose full of her sun-warmed, sweat-moistened molten fire hair; taken aback by how close to his face she’s settled. Her cheek, rather than her temple, is what’s cupped around the curve of his shoulder.

_Say. Words._

Around the post-run panting. And his static mind. And the way she looks to it when she stands this close. She’s such a bright spot in the haze—seeing around her is like trying to spot a bright satellite passing in front of the moon.

“Still tired?” he manages to inquire, and she grunts. “How’d it go with the armor?”

“I’ll come back to it.”

 _Oh, man._ He experiences a sudden urge to throw one limo arm out and wrap it across her shoulders, but they’re still facing opposite directions, and Wash suspects that the effect wouldn’t be the same from this angle.

“Agent Carolina is _coming back_ for something?” he says instead. It’s supposed to be gentle teasing.

She pulls her head away. “Shut up, Wash.”

“I’m kidding. When I can get myself as far as the showers without hurting myself, _then_ I’ll judge.”

“Oh good,” she replies, nudging his arm with her elbow, “then I’m safe forever. Nice hair, by the way.”

She has a mirthless voice when she smiles and a smile-less face when she speaks. The two don’t quite line up. But the comment makes Wash laugh, anyway, an action he immediately regrets.  It moves too much of his body at once; and between running and existing, his body _hurts._

“And thank _you_ for the vote of confidence,” he wheezes.

He tries to turn around. He makes it a quarter of the way there, landing with his shoulder against the base instead of his face. It’s all the farther he can go. Where his laughter fades a void forms and it fills at once with the nothing haze. And the haze forms a vortex he can’t escape.

Wash settles the side of his head against the wall. Carolina drops the back of hers against it. They stand in motionless, slumped silence.

“You probably _should_ take that shower,” she tells him, following a rivulet of sweat down the side of his cheek with only her eyes. It’s a long, slow gaze, that following, and he can feel it passing along his cheek as it goes, more intense than he deserves.

“I—”

 _I’m working on it, I swear,_ he’s going to say. At once a jest and a true statement: psychologically, he’s working towards the idea of moving at all. And, if he can get that, find a reason for it that justifies the bone-deep ache it will leave him with—that just thinking has already left him with—then he can work towards wrestling away his armor. Towards stepping under the water. Towards actually doing something but stand beneath that water, staring at the wall, trying to draw a path through the mental haze with its steamy heat. Or Tucker-beat-him-to-it-the-hot-water-is-gone icy cold, depending.

Before he can explain that, though, he’s interrupted by Grif and Simmons. They pull up in the warthog—having been God knows where, doing Wash doesn’t care what—to the tune of Simmons griping and Grif shouting over him, ignoring him in favor of interrupting Wash.

“Hey man,” he says, “I’m with you. Showers are overrated.”

 “. . . I just ran nine miles.”

“So?” Grif retorts, extracting himself from the jeep with a heavy groan from both himself and the vehicle. “I’ve gone like, a _week_ before.”

Carolina glances sideways at Wash, the horror in her eyes begging to know how serious he is. And if she _actually_ wants to knowhow serious he is. Wash replies with pointed silence while Simmons cries out.

“Grif! We’ve talked about this!”

“Shut up, Simmons. You think I smell fine.”

Simmons’s answer to this is to sputter. Carolina bites her lip, and Wash loses himself in that gesture until Grif speaks to him again.

“Seriously,” he says, “you do you, man.”

“Uh . . . thanks.” _For being the world’s greatest motivator._

“Don’t mention it.”

He then strolls away with Simmons in tow. Wash blinks at Carolina.

“Right,” he says. “So, I’mgoing to go take care of that shower after all. Right now. This instant.”

If he has to cut through the haze by hand to do it.

*

Stage Four:

_Bargaining_

*

The ceiling staring down at him swallows the sound of his breathing and the shapes of his words as Wash mouths them into the dark. _One sheep, two sheep, why am I doing this, I’ve never even seen a real sheep. . ._

He’d have better luck putting himself to sleep by counting pockmarks in the concrete of the ceiling. In the dark.

In short, Wash isn’t sleeping at all.

He hasn’t in hours, and—a too-bright, bleary clock readout promises—he isn’t likely to do so in the two hours he has left before his self-imposed muster. Two hours of lying awake, staring at concrete through the dark, drowning in the muted sounds of his neighbors. Caboose is a quiet sleeper until he isn’t—bursting into slurred exclamations from time to time that make even less sense than his waking words—and Tucker sometimes snores. Well; breathes with a loud, somehow self-satisfied open-mouthed abandon that drifts through the divider between them. The quiet cacophony is at least rhythmic. Nothing like Carolina’s distant staccato inhalations.

Wash picks out the sound of her as his mind fumbles through the night, seeking her without his permission to do so. Her sleep-sounds are punctuated by apnea that steals his breath and freezes his heart the first time he notices it. Pillow muffled breathing, in, out, in—stuttered in again—and nothing. Then an exhale like a death throw, followed by perfect, chilling silence that ends with a compensatory gasp just as Wash is sitting up in bed. He stays upright, palms planted behind him, knees bent, with an ear turned in her direction for minutes on end. She doesn’t do it again. The rhythm she breathes with ebbs and flows, but doesn’t stop.

Wash lies down again. Flat on his back. Eyes to the dark on dark of windowless concrete bunkers in the night.

  _. . . This is not working._

_Give it ten minutes, and then go for a walk, or something._

He makes it four. At that point there’s another hitch in the muffled patterns of Carolina’s breathing, followed by a lurching shifting-of-weight and fabric rush of sound, the expulsion of a held breath, and footsteps. She walks with the sharp, smacking tones of someone still barefoot, feet slapping the floor as she makes her way past his bed to the door.

 _Walk it is,_ he tells himself. Following the noise of her, the sad desperation of the act at least feels like something he can excuse. _I’m roaming the base because my brain hates me_ just doesn’t have the same ring to it as _I came to check on you,_ does: _I came to check on you_ connotes a different breed of sad desperation.

He finds her on the roof.

“You’re up here a little early,” he says. There’s no need to whisper, but he resists the urge to do so only by settling for a tone that still qualifies as “hushed.” It startles her anyway. She wheels around, eyes bright in the dusk-or-dawn colored twilight that’s as dark as Blood Gulch ever gets, legs tensed to bolt despite the fact that there’s nowhere to go but over the edge of the roof. She gasps. It sounds like a hiss.

“Jesus, Wash.”

“Sorry,” he says, watching her relax, one digit, one limb, one vertebrae at a time, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I’m not feeling too difficult to startle,” she replies, waving away his apology with a jerk of her shoulder and a shake of her head. A strand of hair swings loose from the braid she sleeps in while the length of it slides back and forth across her back, tossed between the sharp rises of her shoulder blades, gliding across the musculature that encases them.

“Are you ok?”

She shrugs, wrapping her arms around herself. “Fine. I just had what I guess you could call a nightmare for the first time in a while. I thought I’d try to clear my head a little before going back to sleep.”

Wash sidles towards her, leaning up against one of the woefully inadequate, flimsy-for-concrete parapets along the base’s edge which he’s jokingly taken to referring to as the battlements.

“Does this happen a lot?” he asks. The headache he’s brewing aches less when he talks. Better still, it seems to give Carolina something better to think about. She drops her crossed arms, coming instead to lean beside him.

“It used to,” she admits, “especially when I first got Epsilon. I never mentioned it to him, but I think part of it was having a full AI slot after so long that set them off.”

Wash’s expression must look adequately bewildered to warrant address, because she looks away from him, directing the whole, forced intensity of her attention on the distant cliffs, and says: “I have dreams about Sigma.”

“Oh.” _Small world. I have dreams about Epsilon._ And they are _dreams—_ the decline of wake-up screaming night terrors had served as half the argument for his sanity before he’d accepted reinstatement to the program as Recovery One.

“ . . .Yeah, oh.”

Wash clears his throat. “I didn’t mean—”

She stops him with a look.

A long look. Eyes eerie blue-green under the dusk-colored sky, skin pale to the point of reflectiveness, of radiance, though her hair looks darker than usual without the aid of an equally vibrant sun.

“ . . . I _mean,_ ” he starts again, “that I know how that goes. And I wish I knew what to tell you to do about it.”

“I know what you meant,” she says. Her tone is easy. At odds with her dusk-bright eyes. “. . . Thanks for trying.”

She settles and then slides along the battlement, perpendicular to how he’s standing, before shifting to face him. Still looking at him with dusk trapped in her being, looking for something in his face he wishes he could identify, if only so he knew what to give. He’d offer anything to her, speaking like that. Looking like that. Existing the way she does in this dusk-dawn light. _Anything._

_Don’t even think about it._

For a moment he wants nothing—not peace, not rationality—as badly as he wants to close the narrow distance she’s intentionally put between them and kiss her. Right here, on this rooftop, on this dated base in this nowhere, sweltering canyon, between discussions of nightmares.

_Get ahold of yourself. What are you, 14?_

“Was it worth it?” he asks instead of moving. Her brow furrows, turning the someday-lines between them into canyons of her own. “The nightmares.”

“For having Epsilon?”

Wash nods.

“Absolutely,” she says. “I would go back to having them _every_ night, if it meant . . .”

She stops herself, taking one of his heartbeats with her, and bites into her lip.

“Carolina?”

“I feel like I shouldn’t say that crap,” she explains. “It doesn’t actually change anything.”

Wash shrugs.

“Say anything you need to. I _think_ ,” he pauses for effect, casting a line in hopes of capturing her smile, which he does, “I’m man enough to handle it . . . Any of it. If you ever just want to talk, Carolina, I’m—well, I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s weird how easy those words are. He’s been looking for them since before Chorus, before they’d even rescued Epsilon from the storage unit, and when he finally says them—even that pointedly—her response is as simple as a split second of scrutiny and a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You know,” she says, a little slowly, as if the words are dawning on her as she goes, “I think I’d actually like that. A lot.”

“Then I’m all ears,” he promises. “Shoot.”

She does.

Baring her soul with unexpected readiness—words airy with the weightless relinquishment of her thoughts—she does. She confesses the ways in which her daily reminders to herself to _move on_ fail her; details what she keeps imaging she could trade—would have traded—for any other outcome. Tells him how often she thinks about what she would do if she could just twist time: Which moments she’d like to have bartered for ones of greater insight, or less stubbornness. More willingness to say things aloud she never did.

She talks about the times Epsilon’s going was there, right in front of her eyes, that she’d been unwilling to see; and about the things she’d only realized much later might have been a clue to the way he’d been fading.

She talks about her nightmares and her memories, the things she wishes she _hadn’t_ traded. No one mentions Maine by name. But she does talk about Freelancer. More than she ever has before, her view of it painting a brand new version of his world.

Sometimes imploring, her tone directed elsewhere—eyes distant as she turns her explanations into a sometimes angry, sometimes pleading pitch for bartering with God—she pours her heart out to Wash until the cool shades of dawn take back their color from her eyes and the sun creeps over the cliffs. And then, she opens the same opportunity to him. _What do you remember most?_ They trade questions, answers. Silent, easy lulls and sudden bursts of laughter. By the time the reds and blues wake, they’ve escalated to purely joyful recollection. Tucker appears on the roof to find Carolina doubled over, leaning on Wash’s shoulder just to stay upright, laughing past the point of breathing while he executes an animated play-by-play—gesturing with a pistol in place of a banana---of the aftermath of an incident when he was younger in which Delta had somehow convinced him that it made more sense to eat _inside_ his helmet.

“What would you trade, if you could?” she asks him at one point, somewhere between dusk-dawn of nighttime and that story.

“All of it—or none of it,” he tells her. “I’m honestly not sure.”

_Just not this._

There’s _nothing_ , he concludes—as minutes speaking turn to hours—that he’d be willing to trade for this.

*

Stage Five:

_Acceptance_

*

“Sync?” she calls.

“Sync.”

Wash can hear the smile in her voice as she says “mark.”

Tucker is the first one to dive at them. It turns out to be a calculated move, though it would have gone better if speed weren’t the first enhancement Carolina happened to be running. Which it is. Since Wash _had_ seen that coming.

For all their training, they’ve somehow never held a match before this that included everybody. Thirty seconds into it he wonders why they hadn’t done it sooner. It’s _fun._

Well, at least for him and Carolina.

He rolls sideways, comes up shooting over the din of Sarge shouting what he thinks is supposed to be some kind of catchphrase. A training round strikes him squarely in the chest and sends him flying. Grif laughs.

Carolina shoots him.

The first couple rounds happen more or less like that-: mixed strategy and recklessness resulting in piles of groaning sim troopers. By the third or fourth, though, they’re beginning to get angry enough to care. A round grazes Wash’s arm. A jeep nearly grazes his everything. Only a code word and a shout from him, and a gesture from Carolina, a calculated pulse, are what stop it and the full-body bruising cars usually gift to him.

“Nice,” Wash calls.

“What is it with you and cars?” she retorts. Most of his answer drowns beneath the sounds of a broken tirade of robotic Spanish as Lopez observes the shorted vehicle. Wash catches “pendejo,” among other choice phrases.

“Grif was driving!” he shouts, as Grif rolls out of the jeep, groaning.

“Claro,” Lopez snaps. Wash laughs.

Tucker, meanwhile, takes the opportunity to shoot him in the kneecap. The fifth round goes poorly for Tucker. Carolina berates him. He shoots an approaching Simmons over her shoulder.

By the tenth round no one is laughing anymore—smiling, maybe, around gritted teeth, past emerging bruises—but not laughing. No one has the breath left for it, and the reds and blues have a more vested interest in silence.  Two full minutes pass from the start of the match without a word from them. Or visual. When the starter rung they’d bolted.

“Is that supposed to be a tactic?” Carolina quips.

“I’m genuinely afraid that it is,” he replies.

“Then cover my six.”

Wash slides up behind her, his back to hers, enough room between them to reach back and exchange weapons and not an inch more. Ten minutes pass.

“We could work our way toward the base,” he suggests.

“And if that’s where they’re waiting?”

“Then it’s a good thing training rounds just sting.”

Carolina scoffs.

“That’s great, Wash. Thanks.”

“It’s better than splitting up,” he offers. “That’s probably what they want.”

“Not exactly.”

Tucker appears over a rise to their right, a baton in hand in place of his sword, and the next ten seconds turn to a burst of color as their opposition reappears. Their tactic of choice is as simple as “charge,” but rapidly gained proximity turns it into a fight worth having. Back to back, he and Carolina take them one by one, two by two, shouting warnings at each other, and orders. Though Wash is happy to offer strategy but follow leads, whatever leaderboard-rank ought to be between them is gone, has died somewhere on the long and winding road between their first post-Freelancer encounter and here. Home. Between the team they’d once known, and this ragtag group of now battle-ready idiots they call family. They’re Freelancer’s only living legacy: There’s no cause for separation, anymore. And no desire for it.

When the match ends, Wash is smiling; something they all can see but Carolina as he pulls his helmet away. She’s still at his back, panting as badly as he is—though she’d still never admit she’s tired.

“You win—” Wash says, and someone snorts, “you win for stamina. I’m done.”

“I’m with him,” Carolina agrees from behind him.

The retorts are many, the gloating limited, the smiles shared.

“Not bad, huh?” Tucker says before turning to retreat back to base and ice packs and dinner. He’s the last of them to go, trailing behind to say it.

“Better than that,” Carolina tells him. Wash nods. He’s almost too tired to say anything else; as winded as Carolina sounds—he’s getting just old enough for things like _energy_ to be there one moment and gone the next, his adrenaline rushes short-lived but sharp, buzzing even as they fade.

Carolina is the same way. As Tucker goes, she collapses backward to the tune of clanking ceramic, some, if not all, of her weight pressing against Wash’s back. She drops her head back against his shoulder, her ponytail sliding away down his arm, the salt-heat smell of sweat and the subdued-sweet smell of _her_ gliding up under his nose and goading his heart back to racing though, by now, it should be slowing down.

“Is it just me,” she says, her volume almost like a sigh, “or have they gotten really good, in their own way?”

“In their own way,” he confirms.

She releases a breathless laugh directly under his ear. It sends a bolt of heat through him no amount of sweating will abate. For a moment in its wake, the only sound is breathing, and the blood in his ears, all tempered by the background woosh of the breeze that snakes down the canyon on merciful days to cut through the heat. Wash closes his eyes. Drops his head back. Carolina’s hair brushes his temple. It’s hot and slick, sweat-soaked and sun-stained and welcome against his skin. Looking like fire and liquid copper trapped against her scalp. _I’ll never be over that._ Not if he lives to be a hundred. Or two. Or forever.

“You know,” she muses, her breath tickling both his ear and some deeper part of him, “you and I actually make a damn good team.”

“You’re just now realizing that?”

She elbows him in the back.

“Of course not,” she says. “I just thought you ought to know you make one hell of a partner.”

Her voice fades at the end of the phrase so that he feels he ought to turn his head to follow it. That something could be gleaned from putting his entire body into chasing down her words. He settles with only his head, though that alone is enough to leave him with his nose pressed into the warmth of her hair as he answers her, lips close enough to her scalp to catch on a few unruly strands of it.

 _Watch it,_ he tries to warn himself. But he finds he doesn’t care. His next words are out of him—free of him, a touch huskier than they have a right to be—with his next breath, exhaled directly into her hair.

 “The pleasure’s all mine, Carolina.”

Her verbal answer isn’t immediate. But she shifts—ever so slightly lifts—her head and turns it, so that her forehead brushes his before she speaks.

“Is that supposed to mean something, Agent Washington?” she challenges him. His first instinct is to stutter and retreat. His second is turn it around on her. “ _Do you want it to?”_

 _If you’re going to back down, now is your chance_.

He doesn’t.

Wash smiles, instead, and says—the words easy and true as breathing— “It means whatever you want it to.”

*

_Gain_

*

Her fingers catch in his too-long hair as he lifts her too him, both arms around her, the embrace pulling her off the mattress, the back of her head cupped in his hand. A mess of her free-flowing hair filling his palm as he puts his lips to the soft skin when her chest meets her neck.—tucks his mouth into the hollow space at the base of her throat where he can almost feel her rising pulse. A slow, firm press of chapped lips against velvet-feeling and porcelain-looking skin. Carolina has her scars, but they’re fewer than his, and none of them are here.  They’re elsewhere, lower on her body, excepting the back of her neck. Eta and Iota’s ghosts press back against the heel of his hand as it slides along the base of her skull.

He doesn’t pause over them the way she hovers over his. Over Epsilon’s shadow, and other marks. The gunshot gifts from South on his back, the multitude of dents Maine left in him, the scar bisecting the back of his head which marks where Dr. Grey had reassembled it following a run-in with the butt of Locus’s gun. He doesn’t mind her hand against it. Against any of them. There’s something to her exploring, curious fingers that tickle as she traces his physical topography that pressurizes his chest and relieves it all at once.

Carolina’s hand slides through his hair down to the back of his skull as she draws him to her. She pulls him from her neck to her lips, the taste of them as unexpected with this kiss as the last; only a little coppery. Lately, she’s been biting them less.

Her leg moves against his hip, armor clanking on armor. They’ve only managed to free themselves from it halfway, having fallen into his bed undressed only to the waist, too lost in hot skin and the opportunity wrap arms around ribcages and spines and scared and freckled flesh instead of several inches of plating to be patient. The racket of it makes her laugh.

Her breath rises hot against his lips, her chest, her body, shaking against his breastbone, his stomach, his hips. _Holy . . ._

He stiffens, losing track of her lips for a moment, and she laughs _again_.

“Come back here, Wash,” she orders him.

“Yes ma’am,” he breathes, capturing her against his body, holding her against his chest—against the core of him and the swelling feeling in his heart—as tightly as physics and physiology will allow before tangling his hand in her hair and his lips in her lips; struggling not to smile as he kisses her, instinct screaming at him to never do anything, ever, that could mean having to stop.


End file.
